Local History and Content Curation a presentation by LIz Pidgeon at Libmark's Content Curation seminar May 29 2013
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Liz Pidgeon, Yarra Plenty Regional Library's Local and Family History Librarian presentation on the online project WikiNorthia: documenting life in Melbourne's north which curates local stories and images. As the 2012 recipient of the Margaret C. Ramsay Scholarship she will showcase curation examples from genealogy and local history collections in the UK and USA.
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Local History and Content Curation a presentation by LIz Pidgeon at Libmark's Content Curation seminar May 29 2013
- 1. Local and Family History Content Creation Content Curation LibMark Conference Wednesday May 29 2013 Liz Pidgeon Local and Family History Librarian Yarra Plenty Regional Library
- 2. YPRL Local and Family History Strategic Framework 2011- 2016 Vision – Fostering a Sense of Place
- 3. Goals • Creating Local Content • Developing and maintaining collections • Creating strong connections • Promoting services and collections
- 17. Local and family history services in the UK and USA 2012 Margery C Ramsay scholarship http://infolass.wordpress.com/ Some of this work is produced with the aid of a Margery C Ramsay scholarship presented by the Library Board of Victoria
- 19. The Life and Loves of a Victorian Clerk: from nineteenth-century diarist to blogging sensation
- 21. Background to the Project • Covered areas of London well-known to residents and visitors • Offered an insight in early-Victorian family life and personal affairs • Engaging and entertaining • Existing transcription & family history
- 22. Planning the Project Selecting a platform • Ability to prepare text in advance • Ability to showcase photographs from the collection to illustrate diary entries • Need for strong branding
- 23. Publishing Process • First draft transcription • Proof read and check against the original • Daily entries uploaded, pairing with evocative images from the digitized photograph collection where appropriate
- 24. Presenting the diary for a 21st century audience • Included introduction and footnotes for context • Editing in favour of a more readable text • Coping with “naughty” references
- 26. Reception • Media coverage Evening Standard, The Guardian, the BBC News website and blogs • Emails from international readership • Page hits increase by 6000% initially
- 32. Orange Jelly
- 36. BLANK
- 37. NYPLlabs
- 42. “… but what it does suggest very powerfully is that these very ephemeral things that were considered throwaways contain massive amounts of data. You can do cultural history on the street level. We have that kind of New York City ghost bank, all the people who have lived here and all their stories.” Ben Vershbow, manager of NYPL Labs (Digital Shift Library Journal September 2012)
- 58. Thank you Liz Pidgeon Local and Family History Librarian Yarra Plenty Regional Library lpidgeon@yprl.vic.gov.au @Infolass
Notas del editor
- Last month we launched the re-imagined website but I thought I would first provide some brief history which adds some context to where the project is at today.Wikinorthia: documenting life in Melbourne’s north had its beginnings back in 2005 following funding from the Library Board of Victoria. Projects were being developed under its Libraries Building Communities research and development initiative. Wikinorthia was a project funded through its partnership with Darebin Libraries, Moreland City Libraries and Yarra Plenty Regional Library for innovative public library partnership projects that help to strengthen their communities.
- The idea for the WikiNorthia project originated from concerns about the increasing risk that much of the rich cultural and social history of people living and working in Melbourne’s north would be lost when these people move on or pass away. Although most public libraries have local history collections, a wealth of reminiscences of individuals about their own lives, as well as the histories of local clubs, organisations and businesses are being lost, because so little of it is being documented and preserved for future generations.
- When it was launched it was the first time that the very essence of communities in the north was being captured on such a broad scale. We define Melbourne’s north as the five municipalities of Darebin, Moreland, Banyule, Nillumbik and Whittlesea which the three partner libraries serve. The site began as a wiki. The idea being that people could add and edit content collectively. We envisaged a diverse range of subjects. As a result we have articles relating to art and literature, buildings, community, events, environment, places, sports, recreation, transport and more.We do not want to see it being promoted as a history site per se because it is more that that.
- Stories have a close connection to place. Articles are located or pinned on to a map, using Google functionality. Contributors once registered, add their text but also their photographs, web links and reading lists if they like, as well as descriptive tags to enhance the search facility.Anybody can comment on a story and share online with their social networking accounts such as facebook, twitter and Google Plus. As an administrator I get notified of new articles and make it a practice to promote online quickly and easily via the share icons located on each page.
- Even if you do not have a story to contribute the site provides an avenue for your curiosity, or resource for your local research query. Go to the site, scroll through the map and find your special place and read the associated stories pinned there. Or use the search facility on the upper right hand corner of each page.We have temporarily archived the previous site and I acknowledge past and current members of the Vicnet team who have helped us out there. We will endeavour to have most of the content transferred over by the end of June.
- This is an example of a story that has brought together a resource documenting the Christmas Day Floods in 2011 which impacted the Shire of Nillumbik in particular. We have been able to curate, some first hand accounts and links to additional online resources including photo streams from Flickr and videos on YouTube as well as media reports.People can add comments to all articles which potentially can make the story richer.
- In other stories like that of the former Diamond Valley Community Hospital, where I have captured the bottom of the page here - we have been able to include photos from the libraries collection, a reading list from our local history collection, newspaper report references from our Leader newspapers indexing project as well as links to external sites of interest including links from the Greensboorugh Historical Society.One thing I would like to do, when timing permits or I can get a volunteer on board is to also include links from the historical newspapers on trove and add those to the stories as well.
- We have a number of stories following the tragedy of Black Saturday which impacted the City of Whittlesea and Shire of Nillumbik in particular. We have stories on local cemeteries and war memorials.But the best part of the site and the area that has captured people the most, is in fact the stories about people and in particular personal reminiscences. We have been able to use the site as a “partner” if you will. For example we have a strong reminiscences program at Yarra Plenty – particularly at our Watsonia Library. Stories from those sessions have been written up and added to the site. Merrylands College in Reservoir uploaded a number of stories. We were able to gain permission from writers who had contributed to a Shire of Nillumbik literary group project “Nillumbik Our Stories – 500 word snapshot”. These stories can now be accessed via Wikinorthia. We have a number of stories across the five council areas relating to post war migrant experiences, particularly focusing on life in Australia since arrival.We also have stories from the Moreland Digital Storytelling Project which was originally an exhibition. Those stories are now accessible via Wikinorthia.
- In order to document and preserve life in the North, past and present. We will continue to collect the wealth of individual reminiscences, including current migration stories, the stories of young people, and of those that are less well connected to others in the local community. As well as the histories of local clubs, organisations and businesses. We also hope it will encourage residents to feel part of the larger community as well as help them to develop a greater awareness and confidence in using new technologies.
- We have had external interest in the project from staff at Arts Victoria as it aligns well with their Culture Victoria: Stories, Collections, Places portal. Culture Victoria aims to deliver access to Victorian cultural collections through among other things :STORIES that showcase the richness and diversity of VictoriaThe Culture Victoria website was established in 2010 to provide information about Victoria's culture, history, people, places, collections and events. We have also had interest from our local councils. We have contributed community consultation to inform the City of Whittlesea’s new Cultural Heritage Strategy for 2013, and hope Wikinorthia gets a mention.
- As part of the marketing campaign we have produced a series of five postcards which include generic historical photos and true local stories with the theme “we all have secrets”. This was designed as purely a tool to get attention to the website and a medium to access members of the community who are less confident with the internet and get them interested in what an online avenue has to offer.One of the stories is that of a sham fortune teller who told fortunes to raise cash to feed her family. She was subsequently caught out by the police.
- I invite you to take a look at Wikinorthia and if you have a local story related to our region please feel free to jump on board and pin it to our map. We currently have over 280 stories and growing.
- Westmininster Archives are part of the Westminster Libraries and Archives service, which consists of 13 libraries and includes a music library, home library service and a self service library in a sports centre.
- In 2010, over 160 years after Nathaniel first penned his diary, Westminster City Archives serialised his 260 diary entries for the online community. Hosted on the Westminster City Council website, the daily diary updates attracted widespread press coverage and an international readership.
- This is an image of the first page of the actual diary.
- The diary also led to robust conversation on the Rootschat site. A free family history forum.
- This led to agroup of diary followers, decidingto get together and retrace Nathaniel Bryceson’s steps on a memorial walk in October 2010.In conclusion the diary showcased a unigue aspect of Westminster’s Archives collections, it resonated with the local community and also appealed to a wider audience. A terrific example of content creation using the blogging platform.
- As an aside – Last week Flickr launched its new look - Flickr have described it as a “better, brighter Flickr - revealing a beautiful new design that puts photos at the heart of your Flickr experience”.Flickr is one of the leading photo sharing and organising websites. Via a collaborative process, people can comment and tag your photos. In addition last week Flickr announced A free terabyte of space. Just how big is a terabyte? Flick describe it as “you could take a photo every hour for forty years without filling one”.In addition Flickr is now allowing video upload.This leads the way for libraries more than ever to be able to curate collections online and further promote what they have to offer. A particular focus can certainly include local historical collections.
- The success of the Bryceson diary project led in part to a project which was actually launched at Westminster Archives during my visit in early March this year.The Cookbook of Unknown Ladies: curious recipes and hidden histories from Westminster City Archive has also been created as a blog. This one uses the wordpress platform.The actual Cookbook is a manuscript recipe book in the collections of Westminster City Archives. The recipes, recorded in several different hands, span 150 years of British cookery, providing a fascinating insight into culinary craft of the Georgian and Regency periods.
- Illustrations from the Archives collections have also been used where appropriate to illustrate the blog posts. This example is a drawing of chickens being purchased from a street seller.
- The blog is currently getting about 1000 visits each month. The Archives staff have also run two historic cookery sessions with volunteers in the staff kitchen which have also been reported on the blog. Members of the community have also sent in the results of their efforts to replicate the recipes – many quite successfully and this feedback including photographs have also been posted on the site.
- Another project out of Westminster Archives is “cholera and the Thames”.This project was funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund in 2011. The lead partners were Westminster City Archives with support by Thames Water, WaterAid, The John Snow Society and the London City Mission. The project recounts the fascinating story of London’s battle against cholera in the nineteenth century, how the disease was identified and how, as a result, London's sewage system was constructed to keep the capital's water supply clean and safe and the continuing battle being fought against it today. It was a multi-faceted project, involving a community exhibition, animation workshops, the development of an educational computer game by students at Westminster University, as well as the website itself. Much of the website content was produced by volunteers and interns. The site includes information about the disease today, its history in London, an image gallery from the Archives collection, and an historic timeline and an education pack.
- The Map Warper is their most recent project transforming historical street maps into an interactive digital atlas. The Library scanned nearly all of its public domain New York City atlases, a collection of more than 10,000 maps.The Labs team built a web tool where users can virtually stretch old maps onto a digital model of the world à la Google Maps or OpenStreetMap, thus creating a new copy that is not only aligned with spatial coordinates on the Earth, but normalized across the entire archive of old maps. There is potential then for a future project to add more content and useful information to the maps. The project once set up is reliant on volunteers and to date approximately 1,500 participants have contributed.
- What’s on the menu? was released online in April 2011.The New York Public Library’s restaurant menu collection is one of the largest in the world, used by historians, chefs, novelists and everyday food enthusiasts. However, the menus are very difficult to search for the greatest treasures they contain: specific information about dishes, prices, the organization of meals, and all the stories these things tell us about the history of food and culture.The labs team designed this project in collaboration with the subject specialist librarians. Over 40,000 menus from the library’s rare book collection from the 1850s to the present have been digitized and uploaded to the site. A call was put out for users to transcribe the menus, dish by dish. Doing this dramatically expands the ways in which the collection can be researched and accessed, opening the door to new kinds of discoveries. The first batch of 9,000 items were transcribed in about three months. Since the project was implemented users are now being asked to locate the menus using a geotagger tool. There is no log in required, I had a go at this. It is quite fun and addictive.
- The project which first grabbed my attention was in fact the Direct me NYC: 1940 site.On April 2, 2012 The National Archives released the 1940 census. However the data was not indexed and was very difficult to search and nigh on impossible if you did not already know the location of where your ancestor lived. One way around it at New York Public Library is that a researcher would be directed to the microfilm room with a call number for a phone book to find an address, then to a series of websites called OneStep. The websites coordinate streets with specific census enumeration districts.The Direct Me website streamlined this workflow by digitizing the New York City phone books of the period. Then the labs team built a data entry form so that once users find an address, with the aid of a magnifying tool, they can query it against the One Step site’s data set and see their results, then narrow the results further by selecting cross streets if they need to. This usually narrowed the area to browse for your name in about half of a city block.
- Users can also post an annotation to the address and see it on two maps, a geological survey map from 1940 and the contemporary Open Street Map. Some playful features are included, too: the little excerpt of the phone book the user has “ripped out” shows up surrounding the address, along with headlines from the New York Times on the same day in 1940 as the date the user is visiting the website.This is the result of a search for my husband’s Grand Uncle John Vincent Lees who we knew lived in Brooklyn. The added benefit here is that researchers can also find their relatives in the directories and subsequently the census and then actually visit the location of where their ancestors lived. This is really what family history is all about, at the heart of people wanting to learn more about where they come from.While the value of Direct Me NYC 1940 has lessened now that the census has been indexed, people are still using it, and it remains a free way in, as well as a test case for the value of directory data. Staff from the NYPL’s Millstein division and around the library have been using Direct Me to find notable figures in their research for other projects.
- The 1940 US census community Project was established around the same time as the census was released in April 2012. The project was a joint initiative between the National Archives and Records Administration ( AKA NARA), Archives.com, FamilySearch.org, findmypast.com, and other leading genealogy organizations—with the aim to create a free, high quality, searchable database of the records.Individuals and family history organisations were asked to index the census online. A simple registration process and online software made it easy for people to participate, in fact over 100,000 people contributed to indexing 135 million names in less than 6 months.
- There was a lot of online marketing to enthuse volunteers to undertake the huge effort required to index the complete 1940 census and one of the tools used was the use of World War 2 imagery and in particular that of the women working on the home front.
- It was also promoted at major genealogy conferences. Another way to promote the indexing project was to showcase the stories within the census – this included film icons such as Clint Eastwood and Olympians such as athlete Jesse Owens because the indexing period was at the same time as the London Olympic Games.
- Following completion of the 1940 US Census, there is now a major effort to index US Immigration and Naturalization records, spearheaded by FamilySearch. Many millions of these records are currently available as images in the FamilySearch collections, but now must be indexed in order to make them searchable.
- There are many other projects that people can choose to work on including cemetery records in Queensland and New South Wales.
- Just over a month ago FamilySearch announced that the major milestone of one billion records indexed and arbitrated had been achieved, since the launch of FamilySearch indexing in September of 2006. I have tried my hand at this too and it is also fun and easy!
- The Citizen Advice Dashboard was launched in December 2011 by the National Archives USA. It enables people to tag, transcribe, edit, upload and share articles. One project involves transcribing weather from Arctic Ships logs.Another interesting project from the National Archives was the employment of a part-time Wikipedian in residence. Part of his role has been recruiting volunteers to transcribe Archives documents into searchable text on Wikisource, the Wikipedia repository for primary documents which are in the public domain. He has transferred about 90,000 Archives documents to Wikimedia Commons, the online encyclopedia's image repository. The Archives' long-term goal is to get all its billions-strong holdings online.
- The National Archives of Australia has a similar project to the US’s Citizen Archivist’s Dashboard.Through the ‘arcHIVE’ website, volunteers are asked to help transcribe records, and by doing so, it will allow them to be searched, and assists in these items being added to RecordSearch.
- HistoryPin is a site out of the UK.It is described as a digital user-generated archives of historical photos, videos, audio recordings and personal recollections. Users are able to use the location and date of their content to “pin it” to Google maps – and was in fact one of the sites that inspired Wikinorthia.One of the best features is to be able to pin your image to Google street view. This provides a great comparison between the past and the present.
- Institutions or individuals can add their images and then curate collections within their streams, for example this collection from the State Library of New South Wales on historic churches which would be a collection of particular interest to family historians for example. Museum Victoria are also adding content so Kate may elaborate on this further this afternoon.
- I also wanted to quickly mention Pinterest. There is staggering statistics on the power of this website. In January 2012, Pinterest became the fastest-growing standalone website ever-surpassing Facebook, My Space, and Twitter; with growth rate exceeding 4000 per cent since mid-2011, Pinterest now drives more referral traffic than Google Plus, LinkedIn, and YouTube combined.
- Pinterest is another example of pinning images.Vicroads have a profile. They have 19 themed boards recognising their 100 year anniversary. Their pins actually link back to the orignal source which is their archive on HistoryPin.Crafters, home decorators, scrapbookers and cooks have all been the traditional users of Pinterest in its very short history. But increasingly small busnesses, genealogists, especially bloggers and libraries are creating a presence.I attended the Rootsech Conference in Salt Lake City on my trip. This is a major genealogy and technology conference. Both HistoryPin and Pinterest were being showcased as new tools for genealogists to take advantage of in both showcasing their family history and as a resource to discover more to add to their stories.
- The Ryerson Index is a project to index, mostly contemporary death notices and obituaries in Australian newspapers. It is a valuable free resource for researchers of Australian family history and is managed by a sub committee of the Sydney DPS or Dead Persons Society. The Index grows at a rate of over 100 entries per day. At Yarra Plenty Regional Library we have three bound Leader newspaper collections in our libraries at Mill Park, Diamond Valley and Ivanhoe Libraries from the 1960s through to present day.In an effort to make these valuable resources more accessible we have commenced a volunteer program to index the papers, according to given criteria and we also have separate volunteers who are indexing the death notices and contributing these online to the Ryerson Index site.
- We have had over 4,600 notices contributed for the Heidelberg Leader alone. I believe that we are the only Australian public library actively participating in the project at the moment. I am happy to have a chat with anyone who is interested in contributing to the project.
- This poster was developed in 2009 by a family history group in the USA but I suspect the tip of the iceberg is in fact bigger today. We are seeing organisations such as the Internet Archive and the new Digital Public Library of America bringing online the riches from library, archive, and museums collections and more and making them freely available to the world, often via digitisation programs. However, despite the best efforts of organisations such as Internet Archive who I visited in San Francisco and who’s mission is “to make all human knowledge universally accessible”, there will always be libraries with collections that will only be accessible to researchers in person. I visited local studies collections in the United Kingdom in particular with hundreds of thousands of items, some of which were hundreds of years old. I hope that libraries can consider the treasures we have in our collections and how we can best promote them to the wider community via curating collections online.Genealogists, historians and librarians are constantly identifying, locating, filtering, organizing, and sharing content and information and that is what content curation is all about.